“The flattened wheel of the trolley,” he says, “banging the track day and night, and tormenting the waking and sleeping ear, was, oddly enough, the inspiration of Reforms which have made our city the quietest in the world. The trolleys now pass unheard; the elevated train glides by overhead with only a modulated murmur, the subway is a retreat fit for meditation and prayer, where the passenger can possess his soul in a peace to be found nowhere else; the automobile whirrs softly through the most crowded thoroughfare, far below the speed limit, with a sigh of gentle satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, ‘like the sweet South, taking and giving odor.’” It is beside the mark to note that Shakespeare did not write “taking” but “stealing,” and he certainly did not spell odour Mr. Howells’s way. Our author proceeds to assure us that American men are not now the intellectual inferiors of American women, “or at least not so much the inferiors”; that American men have made “a vast advance in the knowledge and love of literature,” and that “with the multitude of our periodicals, and the swarm of our fictions selling from a hundred thousand to half a million each, even our business men cannot wholly escape culture, and they have become more and more cultured, so that now you frequently hear them asking what this or that book is all about.” Later he says of the New Yorkers: “They are purely commercial, and the thing that cannot be bought and sold has logically no place in their life. They applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amount given, rather than by the love which goes with the giving. The widow’s mite has little credit with them, but the rich man’s million has an acclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift is made. It is only the poor in America who do charity—by giving help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they are at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money they give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time some man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to a public institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with the people who are under-paid for their work, or cannot get work; and then his deed is famed throughout the Country as a thing really beyond praise. Yet anyone who thinks about it must know that he never earned the millions he kept, or the millions he gave, but somehow made them from the labours of others; that with all the wealth left him he cannot miss the fortune that he lavishes, any more than if the check (English, cheque) which conveyed it were a withered leaf, and not in any wise so much as an ordinary working man might feel the bestowal of a postage stamp.”